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Why We Use Affiliate Organizer: An Affiliate Organizer Review

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 12:54 am

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Affiliate Organizer Review One thing you will find after you have been in the Affiliate Marketing business for a while is that you will accumulate lots of email addresses, passwords, user names and a variety of other information.

And believe me it doesn’t take too long for all this information to become hard to manage, unless you are a very organized person.

Last year we had a piece of software recommended to us that would simplify our affiliate business and get us completely organized.

Now I have to say at the time that I was a bit skeptical and didn’t really expect it to be anything special. In fact I didn’t even buy the software right away because I thought that I was pretty organized what with my notebooks and spreadsheets and the rest.

It was after we received a second recommendation that we took that as a sign and went and purchased a copy of Affiliate Organizer and I have to say that I am so glad we did. This little piece of software is just brilliant and it definitely keeps us organized.

The main feature of the Affiliate Organizer is that it allows you to store all your user names and passwords in the one place.

How many times have you joined something on the net and had to register with a user name and password?I have literally hundreds of passwords for different things – forums, affiliate networks, blogs, websites and so on. The Affiliate Organizer allows me to store them in the one place and access them easily.

It’s other features include:

A calendar function where you can set up upcoming events and tasks and be reminded of them with either a pop-up or an email.
A category to store websites including DNS, ftp settings, passwords, hosting company details and so on.
The ability to store the details of software packages you have purchased and enter the unlock codes and the registration details.
A section for affiliate merchants where you can add their website address, the commission amount, the contact name, join up date and so much more.
A section to store keyword lists and click on keywords that you have used so you can stay on track.
A category to store forums that you have signed up with and include the url, password and user name.
An area to keep track of tasks that you have outsourced including the freelancers name, email, the project description, date started and completed, keywords lists, the cost and much more.
A category where you can store any training or seminars you may be taking with fields to include the event, location, date, time, cost, contact name and so on.
A section where you can add any ideas or projects you have in mind.
And the list goes on…

The icing on the cake for this program is that if you can’t find a place to store a piece of information then you can simply create your own categories and fields so you can literally store almost anything.

The software is extremely simple to install and once installed sits in your system tray for easy access and it starts up when you computer starts up – although you can turn off this setting if you prefer.

What I really like is that you can password protect the whole program so that even if your computer is stolen no one can access your passwords.

These are just a few of the features of the Affiliate Organizer. We literally use it every day and couldn’t do without it.

What is dofollow and nofollow?

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 10:40 pm

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What is Nofollow This is a question that is not an easy one to answer without first providing you with a bit of background, so here is an explanation that will hopefully help you to understand these terms.

The goal of many internet marketers, especially those who focus on natural search, is to get good quality backlinks to their site.

So what is a backlink?:

Firstly, backlinks are also known by different names and inlinks or inbound links are other common terms.

It really doesn’t matter if this doesn’t make sense just yet, all you really need to know is that a backlink is any link from another website to your website.

Why are backlinks important?

Having good quality backlinks coming into your website can make a great deal of difference in how well your site is ranked in Google. This is the reason why many internet marketers put a lot of work into getting plenty of good quality, relevant backlinks because they know what a difference this will make in how well their website ranks in Google.

Unfortunately this process is open to abuse as webmasters go out of their way to grab as many backlinks as they can get, including ones that aren’t relevant to their site and could even be considered as just spam. Google became aware of this problem and in 2005 introduced the nofollow tag. What this did was effectively stop search engines from giving any credit to a link that had the nofollow attribute.

So how does the nofollow tag work?

Say for instance you were creating a link to my blog from your website. This is the code you would use:

<a href=”http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/”> Affiliate Blog Online</a>

And it would create the following link: Affiliate Blog Online

With the nofollow tag the code would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Affiliate Blog Online</a>

Notice the addition of rel=”nofollow”. Although it has the bit of extra code the link would still look the same, like this: Affiliate Blog Online. So although you can’t tell the difference by looking at the link itself, the code behind it is telling the search engines that they shouldn’t give any juice to that link.

You will find the nofollow tag is standard on most of the major blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress and Typepad. This helps to prevent comment spam although we personally still get a huge amount of spam so I’m not sure it has done the job it was originally intended to do.

So how does the dofollow tag work?

In effect, dofollow is the opposite of nofollow – in other words, the search engines do give credit to the link.

To create a dofollow link the following code would be used:

<a href=”http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/”> Affiliate Blog Online</a>

But hang on a minute, is this right? You are probably wondering where the dofollow attribute is in that piece of code. Well there is no actual dofollow tag. It is just a term used to describe the opposite of nofollow.

So when you see the term ‘dofollow blog’ it just means that the blog has removed the nofollow attribute. So if you posted a comment on that blog then the link to your website would be given credit by Google and the other search engines.

Dofollow Plugins

To turn your blog into a dofollow blog you can download a plugin that removes the nofollow attribute from automatically attaching itself to comments left on your blog.

Andy Beard has put together a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins on his site so check it out.

You can also join the No Nofollow community at Bumpzee if you really feel strongly about this issue.

The benefit of creating a dofollow blog is that it encourages people to leave commments but on the other hand it can also encourage even more spam. Just ensure that you have the Akismet Plugin installed to help combat spam.

The Top 5 Best WordPress Plugins

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 5:46 am

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In the past few days, we moved from our old blogging platform to WordPress and have been busily uploading plugins that will benefit our blogging experience and help in terms of SEO.

Although we have used WordPress extensively in the past, we haven’t really used plugins to their full advantage. It has been pretty much trial and error and in fact, more often than not we would just upload a plugin because it looked pretty cool.

So prior to moving this blog over to WordPress, I did some extensive research to find out what are the ‘must have’ plugins for WordPress, and as a result of my research, here are the top 5 best WordPress plugins:

1. All-In-One-SEO Pack

This in my opinion is one of the best plugins to improve WordPress SEO. It ensures that your blog posts have better titles, better descriptions and it also helps to reduce problems associated with duplicate content.

Once activated you only need to change the main options once. Then for each individual post, you can change the title tag, description and keywords, although this is not required as the SEO Pack determines what needs to be included in these fields automatically by your original settings.

Download Here

2. What Would Seth Godin Do?

Believe it or not, ‘What Would Seth Godin Do? is the name of the plugin. Who is Seth Godin? - He is probably best known as the creator of Squidoo but is also the writer of a number of books and has probably one of the most popular blogs on the internet.

The reason the plugin got it’s name is because of something Seth Godin mentioned on his blog:

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.

This got Richard Millar working on a WordPress plugin that would do just that…hence the ‘What Would Seth Godin Do’ plugin.

What this plugin does is place a small box of text either at the top or the bottom of each post depending on the number of times a visitor comes to your blog. So for instance, the first three times a visitor comes to your blog they could see one message and then anytime after that they could see a different message.

You can change the message to say whatever you like and you can also add a url.

This is a very cool plug-in and a definite must have.

Download Here

3. Subscribe to Comments

If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog you might have seen a small tick box under the comment field that allows you to subscribe to the post. If you ticked this checkbox then you would receive an email notification when further comments are left by other visitors on that particular blog post.

This is a great way to get readers to return to your blog as they follow up on responses left in response to their comments.

To get this option on your blog you will need to download the Subscribe to Comments plugin.

Download Here

4. Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress

A sitemap is, in its most basic terms, a map of your site. It lets the search engine robots know how to find pages on your site and this means your pages are more likely to be indexed.

This plugin creates a sitemap for your blog and it also pings the major search engines when you have made changes to your blog.

Download Here

5. Share This

This handy plugin allows your visitors to share your posts with some of the top social bookmarking or networking sites.

Once activated, the plugin places a link at the end of each of your posts so that when it is clicked a pop-up is displayed that allows the reader to select the social networking or bookmarking site they want to submit your post to.

You do have to register to get this to work.

Download Here

So there you have it – the top 5 WordPress plugins. I have uploaded each to this blog and they are all working perfectly.

If you have any plugin suggestions then please leave a comment.

Are We Crazy?!

Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 9:18 pm

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There are times in a person’s life when they realize that they need to change direction. Well for us that time is now….we’ve made the decision to finally become serious about [tag-tec]Internet Marketing[/tag-tec]. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve have been doing this for a couple of years now and we do make money from what we do but it’s not always as consistent as we would like. It’s also not in the region of what the super affiliates make.

We want to become serious players and strengthen the backbone of our business. This has been building up for some time now and a few different factors have moved us into this direction:

1. We have previously focused solely on organic search and although we are damn good at it, it is a slow process and neither of us are finding the work enjoyable anymore.

2. We have recently joined the ‘Wealthy Affiliate University’ program. They promote money making techniques that are new and exciting and what I personally find fun to do. Their methods are focused on speedier ways to [tag-tec]make money online[/tag-tec].

3. We have been reading quite a few different eBooks written by some of the best in the business and we see consistencies amongst them that we would like to duplicate.

All of these combined have pushed us forward to where we are today and that is at the point where we are completely overhauling this blog, and I mean completely overhauling. The only thing that really remains as I write this blog post is the domain name. We have totally deleted all of our blog posts – over 200 of them and numerous articles and reviews of affiliate products. Some might say we are crazy to do it but we need it to be a completely fresh start. Out with the old and in with the new as they say.

So we are taking the advice of the blog mavens out there and we will be developing this blog to provide strong well written articles that over deliver in reader expectation.

We will provide you with information to help you succeed because in doing that we will also succeed.

We will listen to what you want and develop friendships with you as we all try to improve our Internet businesses.

We will teach you what we know without concern that we are giving away something of monetary value for nothing.

And most of all we will provide overall value to make your life as Internet Marketers that much easier.

Remember we have had success doing it the hard way, so now we can all concentrate on succeeding by doing it the easy way.

Join us now in our endeavors to reach Super Affiliate status.